RFC 3115 (rfc3115) - Page 2 of 9

Mobile IP Vendor/Organization-Specific Extensions

RFC 3115          Mobile IP Vendor Specific Extensions        April 2001


1. Introduction

   Current specification of Mobile IP [1] does not allow for
   organizations and vendors to include organization/vendor-specific
   information in the Mobile IP messages.  With the imminent wide scale
   deployment of Mobile IP it is useful to have vendor or organization-
   Specific Extensions to support this capability.  This document
   defines two extensions that can be used for making organization
   specific extensions by vendors/organizations for their own specific
   purposes.

1.1. Specification Language

   The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [3].

   In addition, the following words are used to signify the requirements
   of the specification.

   silently discard
            The implementation discards the datagram without further
            processing, and without indicating an error to the sender.
            The implementation SHOULD provide the capability of logging
            the error, including the contents of the discarded datagram,
            and SHOULD record the event in a statistics counter.

2. Vendor/Organization Specific Extensions

   Two Vendor/Organization Specific Extensions are described, Critical
   (CVSE) and Normal (NVSE) Vendor/Organization Specific Extensions.
   The basic differences between the Critical and Normal Extensions are
   that when the Critical extension is encountered but not recognized,
   the message containing the extension MUST be silently discarded,
   whereas when a Normal Vendor/Organization Specific Extension is
   encountered but not recognized, the extension SHOULD be ignored, but
   the rest of the Extensions and message data MUST still be processed.
   Another difference between the two is that Critical
   Vendor/Organization Extension has a length field of two octets and
   the NVSE has a length field of only one octet.











Dommety & Leung             Standards Track